First impressions: Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire

Unboxing Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire

Here’s what you get when your Kindle Fire arrives.

When Amazon.com unveiled the first Kindle, it was praised more for the concept than its design. The initial Kindle was clunky with an angular, wedge-shaped case. It used an e-Ink display previously seen in e-readers by Sony and others, so it wasn’t new in that regard.

But the fact that you could buy books on impulse and instantly have them delivered wirelessly to the e-reader was groundbreaking.

Subsequent Kindles became faster, thinner and certainly cheaper. Version 1.0, launched in November 2007, cost $399; today, a comparable model sells for $80. Amazon has a history of making its early products better and less costly over time. And that should give pause to anyone with any impulse control regarding the online retailer’s first foray into a tablet computer, the Kindle Fire.

I’ve been playing with the Fire since receiving a review unit on Tuesday. While Amazon has lots of experience with e-Ink-based readers, this is very much a version 1.0 tablet. It has lots of potential, but that’s undercut by flaws that are apparent immediately.

But the flaws are, in turn, undercut by the price. At $199, this is a remarkable value as tablets go. If you’re willing to put up with some frustration, you’ll likely get your money’s worth out of the Fire.

The Kindle Fire is a 7-inch tablet that uses the design of RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook. It’s a little thinner than the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab and a little lighter, weighing about a pound. It’s comfortable in your palm, and it fits easily in the front pocket of my Dockers slacks – though the resulting rectangular bulge along the outside of my thigh is a little awkward!

As with other Kindles, the Fire arrives associated with your Amazon account. There are only a couple of setup steps, including connecting to Wi-Fi – there’s no 3G connection available for the Fire.

The display’s default brightness was a little dim, but increasing it by about 10 percent made it better. The screen’s glass is very glossy and there was a lot of reflection, particularly in office-style lighting.

The home screen looks like a bookshelf, with your recently used and featured apps appearing on the top shelf. Underneath are apps you’ve designated as favorites. It’s very similar to the interface Apple uses for iBooks on its iOS devices.

The top-shelf apps scroll to the left and right in a manner similar to iTunes’ CoverFlow display. This area is hard to control. I find it’s hard to stop on the icon I want to tap, as though the flow can’t overcome its own momentum.

While the home screen’s scrolling is almost too peppy, other components can be balky and sluggish. Tapping on an app’s icon doesn’t always bring it up the first time. Kindle page turns aren’t as responsive as they should be, and launching books has a noticeable delay. Other apps, like Amazon’s shopping app, scroll smoothly.

This is an Android 2.3-based tablet, but forget about using Google’s Android Market to get apps. Instead, you’re limited to Amazon’s App Store. While it has most of the major and most-desired apps, there are some gaps. Twitter’s own Android client is MIA, for example. (Note that you can “side-load” apps through developer’s sites, but this may be challenging for novice users and may open the door to malware.)

Where the Fire excels is in its interaction with Amazon’s own services, which is just what you’d expect. Movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video plays beautifully. Amazon’s Cloud Player is built in, allowing you play MP3s from its locker service. You can also play music stored on the device, but it has a limited amount of space for onboard files – about 6.5 GB.

Reading is also a pleasure. Kindle books have sharp, crisp text and look much better than the text on the Kindle app for the iPad.

Amazon.com includes a Web browser – dubbed Silk – that renders some parts of pages on its cloud servers. This is supposed to make for zippier browsing. I found there to be a slight delay before a page loads, but once it starts to appear, it finishes very quickly. One nice feature: You can set the browser to always show either desktop or available mobile themes for sites, or let the site itself dictate the view.

I haven’t had the Fire long enough to get a feel for battery life, but it arrived with about a 75 percent charge and, with fairly heavy use, was down to about 25 percent at day’s end.

Most of the issues I’ve seen on the Fire likely can be fixed with software updates. Amazon has been somewhat slow to update its e-Ink Kindles, but I suspect patches for this will come quicker, given the competitive nature of the market. Amazon won’t want the Fire’s flaws to dampen the early buzz it’s got.

Those who expect the Fire to be an “iPad killer” will be disappointed. This lacks the power, fluidity and full-featured capabilities of the iPad, as well as competing Android tablets. Its emphasis is to sell you more stuff from Amazon, and if that’s what you expect it to do, it excels.